As a young kid with my mother and grandmother, I used to shop at the Blue Ridge Outlet Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. As a teenage I worked there. The Outlet was not just a mall. It consisted of three- (later four) abandoned textile mills that had been restored. I would run up and down the hardwood floor halls, look up at the exposed steel beams and wonder in awe at the space layout. I just loved to hang out there. While the Outlet was in our community, it brought people from all over the area. The local economy was stimulated; the downtown area was booming. I marveled at this environment and wondered how a shopping mall could be so cool and do so much good for blocks and blocks around it. I learned much later in life that this type of restoration of a historic property was called adaptive reuse and it happens all over the country.
In the late 1990s, when a national chain of outlet centers, Prime Outlets, built a new mall twenty miles north of Martinsburg (closer to the DC Metro area) the Blue Ridge Outlet Center closed for business.
The controversy surrounding that deal is a topic for another post!
But, obviously, this wasn't the first time that these buildings had sat empty. Originally, the large, well built, brick buildings were part of the expansion of Interwoven Mills, a Philadelphia based maker of men's hosiery (if you can believe that)! From the 1920s to the closure of the factory in 1979, Interwoven was one of the largest employers in the city. The company survived the great depression, WWII, two national worker labor strikes and Vietnam, but couldn't survive the changing times - men's hosiery, for god's sake! So from the late 70s into the 80s the city of Martinsburg wondered how to revitalize their downtown until this rich dude, Chatfield Taylor (how could I ever forget that name), had a dollar (or a few million) and a dream and turned these HUGE abandoned buildings into what would eventually turn me into an historic preservation nut!
Today the buildings, I believe for the most part, have been adapted yet again to house the Berkeley County Judicial Center and other County offices.
The point? Large anchor buildings in our small cities and towns can make or break a downtown. If these once vibrant, bustling buildings are allowed to sit abandoned, everything around them crumbles. The history of the Interwoven Mills is one that I find great inspiration in and I just wanted to share it's story.
